Video: Hiding unused attributes

In addition to keeping your rigs organized, you'll also want to start restricting how the rigs operate. And what we can do is hide those attributes that were not going to be used in controlling the character. Now this foot is a great example. I have a couple of controls for this foot, so I have, for example, the foot control here, and this control allows you to move or rotate the foot. But if we go to the other control here, let's say a toe control, well, you don't really want to move that, because that's going to move along with the foot.

Character Rigging in Maya provides a basic introduction to rigging theory, and delves into the details of how to create professional, realistic 3D characters. Instructor and animation veteran George Maestri shows how to combine Maya's skeleton, inverse kinematics (IK), and constraint tools to create a basic rig for a character, and how to attach the character mesh to the skeleton using Maya's skinning tools. The course also explores advanced rigging controls such as IK switches and facial animation and how to create a control panel to manipulate the character's expressions. Exercise files accompany the tutorials.

Hiding unused attributes

In addition to keeping your rigs organized, you'll also want to startrestricting how the rigs operate.And what we can do is hide those attributes that were not going to be used incontrolling the character.Now this foot is a great example.I have a couple of controls for this foot, so I have, for example, the footcontrol here, and this control allows you to move or rotate the foot.But if we go to the other control here, let's say a toe control, well, you don'treally want to move that, because that's going to move along with the foot.

And this really should only rotate along one direction, in other words, the foot isonly going to move up and down.We are not going to twist the foot left or right, or anything like that.So, in order to make the rig more understandable and easier to use, we want tohide those attributes that we don't want the animators to touch.So let's go ahead and select this left toe here, and we're going to hide thoseattributes that we don't want the animators to touch.So I'm going to go ahead and select the Translate nodes, and we canright-click over those, and the first thing we want to do is lock them, sothat way they're not animated.

We can do the same here, we can just left-click and drag, and right-click andlock everything, but Rotate X.And Rotate X is what moves that toe up and down.So when I select this toe, I can't rotate it except around the direction that Iwant to, and I can't move it.So that really restricts how this operates.So when the animator comes to this particular part of the character's body, theywill know that all I can do is rotate this along X.Now if we want to make this even more clear, we can start hiding attributes, so Ican left-click and drag over Translate, right-click and do Hide Selected.

We can do the same for these attributes as well, again, left-click and drag,right-click, Hide Selected.So now when I select this left toe control, all I can do is rotate along X andthat makes it very clear to the animator or whoever else is using this rig.Now there are times when you may accidentally hide an attribute that you want to show later.So let me show you another way to do this where you can actually hide andshow attributes at will.

And that's found under Window > General Editors, and it's called Channel Control.And this is just a nice little interface that allows you to see exactly whichattributes are hidden and locked.So these are Keyable and Locked, so if I select my left toe here, you will seethat Rotate X is the only keyable parameter.If I wanted to rotate around other axis, I could scroll down this hiddenlist here, select what I want and then just click this Move button and that moves them over.

And you can see here, how they are now visible.We also have a Locked panel here, and again, I can select those and movethose to the unlocked.And again, you can see how it does the exact same thing as lock and unlockin the Channel Box.So, what we can do is now we can restrict or control exactly which parametersthe animator can use.So go ahead through the rest of your foot rig and hide and lock those parametersthat you don't want the animators to touch.

Learn by watching, listening, and doing, Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along Premium memberships include access to all exercise files in the library.

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Learn by watching, listening, and doing! Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along. Exercise files are available with all Premium memberships.
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